A lawyer calls Dek Elstrom with a fast, four-hundred dollar proposition. A woman died, naming Dek to execute her will. No matter that Dek didn't know the woman. No matter, too, that the woman's estate was only worth a few hundred. Happens all the time, the lawyer said.

To a man broke and huddling in an unheated stone turret in February, the sound of four hundred falling down his chimney is louder than his voice of reason. Dek agrees, runs up to a hamlet ten miles north of nowhere, finds blood, finds murder. And maybe finds a thread to his past. He races to chase down leads to the killers . . .

. . . before the dead woman is killed again.